Who Killed Ruth Davenport? Part 14, We are like the dreamer

Well, well, well. Part 14 of Twin Peaks the Return has aired and if this was a book of the bible it would be called Revelations. What an episode! I have so much to talk about this week.

We kick off in Buckhorn, South Dakota where we find Gordon Cole. He is calling the Twin Peaks Sheriffs Department. Lucy Brennan answers the phone, she recognises his voice immediately of course, despite it being 25 years since they last spoke, not that his booming voice is hard not to notice but there are no flies on Lucy. After discussing the fact that she’s been there all that time, the exception being vacations, Bora Bora no less, she puts him through to Sheriff Truman.

Gordon is expecting to speak to Harry. Frank Truman explains that he is unwell and being cared for. Frank then tells him the reason for his call, that Hawk has found missing pages of Laura Palmers Diary that could indicate that there are two Coopers. Gordon thanks him for the information but tells him that he cannot comment on this information but that he really appreciates it. Frank doesn’t ask anything more, and interestingly, and very frustratingly doesn’t tell him anything more either. No mention of the Great Northern Hotel room key of Coopers that has been sent in and no mention of their planned trip to Jack Rabbits Palace and the message left by Major Briggs for Bobby. Goddammit!

But at least we know now that Gordon is on to the fact that there are two Coopers. I mean we have pretty much known that they’ve known for a while, but this is perhaps clarification.

Next stop the hotel room in Buckhorn, which appears to have been turned into some super FBI Intelligence hub! What with Gordon keeping his wine cellar there and now this, that hotel is super accommodating!

Tammy Preston and Albert Rosenfield sit in this hotel room and Albert starts to tell Tammy the story of the first Blue Rose case. You know, I never really thought we would ever get to hear this, so it was quite a stunning moment, in an episode full of them.

Albert tells her that Case no.1, that started the whole thing happened in 1975. Two young Field Agents investigate a murder in Olympia, Washington. They arrive at a Motel to arrest a suspect named Lois Duffy. They hear a gunshot outside her room and kick the door in. They find two women, one on the floor dying from a bullet wound to the abdomen. The other holds a gun which she drops as she backs away. She speaks her last words to them, “I am like the Blue Rose“. She smiles. Then dies. Then disappears before their eyes. The other woman screaming in the corner, they now notice is also Lois Duffy. But Lois did not have a twin sister. Then whilst awaiting trial for a murder she swore she didn’t commit, this Lois hangs herself. The two arresting officers were Gordon Cole and Phillip Jeffries.

Albert then asks Tammy, “Now what’s the question that you should ask me?” Tammy replies, “What is the significance of the Blue Rose?”, “And the answer?” Albert asks, “A blue rose does not occur in nature, it’s not a natural thing. The dying woman was not natural. Conjured. What’s the word? A Tupla.” Albert nods impressed with her insight and calmness at the receipt of this information. They have made a good choice with Tammy. She’s cool.

Chrysta Bell and Miguel Ferrer in a still from Twin Peaks. Photo: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME

So what is a Tulpa? Wikipedia tells me, A Tupla is a thoughtform, or being, created from the collective thoughts of separate individuals. The concept of Tulpas is theoretical in nature and originates from Tibetan mythology, where Tulpas are described as extra bodies that were created from one person’s mind in order to travel to spiritual realms. So Tulpa’s are manifestations conjured up by people, perhaps like an imaginary friend. Alexandra David-Neel wrote about the Tulpa’s ability to develop a mind of its own once it is endowed with enough vitality, that it is then capable of playing the part of a real being, free of maker’s control.

I am not ashamed to say that I had not heard of a Tulpa before. When I read what they were I was a little shocked, of course it all makes sense in the world of Twin Peaks, and perhaps also to me personally. I myself had an imaginary friend when I was 4 years old. This little girl I called Nelly was very naughty, she got me into all sorts of trouble for messing up my bedroom in the middle of the night. She would sit on my bed, and throw my dolls all over the place and I would get a telling off for it the next morning. My family knew of Nelly but they didn’t believe in her of course. Then one day, after another telling off, I sat on my bed and told Nelly that I didn’t want to play with her anymore. I remember this clearly, despite being only 5 years old by now. She got angry with me, and the left half of her face turned completely jet black. Then she disappeared never to be seen again. I haven’t told anyone that bit before. Many, many years later, for some reason she was brought up at a family meal. My brothers are 9 and 11 years older than me. The eldest had not been around much as he had gone to college in Liverpool. I described what Nelly looked like, and I noticed my eldest brothers face turn ghostly white. He had seen her too, standing at the top of the stairs, in exactly the white frilly clothes I described, auburn hair in ringlets. Had I conjured up a Tulpa? I had moved from my birth place aged 4, left all the friends I knew at play group, did I make a new friend for myself, who didn’t turn out so nice?

What does this mean in the world of Twin Peaks? There are many doubles, the most obvious being the current Cooper situation. Was the doppleganger Cooper someone that our Good Dale had been thinking about, manifesting in his mind all these years, only for him to come to fruition in the most terrifying way? Dopplecooper now being free of his maker, with his own thoughts and objectives. What makes these imaginary beings become real? Garmonbozia of course, pain and suffering/sorrow. Whilst we see the creamed corn being eaten, it is perhaps just symbolic, a reference to the pain and suffering we all face in our lives, at varying levels, becoming real life manifestations, becoming a life of their own, taking over. It’s said that Poltergeists are formed by heightened emotions and happen often in homes where a child is going through puberty, Tulpa’s sound similarly charged. This thought brings me back to Part 8, where we see the girl in Mexico swallowing the frogmoth. This at a time in her life, starting her journey through adolescence, starting to bloom, feelings of lust/love for the first time. Something had been conjured inside her. I suspect something is conjured in all of us at that time in our lives, and it’s no difference than in the case of Laura Palmer herself, her secret diary tells a tragic tale of an innocence snatched away from her. Something bad was growing inside her, but as we know, she is The One, and she fought the darkness, did not allow BOB in. Did not allow her own Tulpa to surface.

I am not sure that there is anyone that has suffered more in Twin Peaks than Sarah Palmer, who I will touch on again more later, but thinking back to Series 1 and 2, when she first lost her only child, her precious Laura. Not only that, to discover that her husband, the father of her child, had been molesting their daughter for years, and then murdered her. What a weight to live with. That’s a lot of suffering, pain, guilt, grief. So much Garmonbozia.

In those first few days she would have made enough to conjure someone up – Maddy for instance. I am not suggesting that Maddy wasn’t real, of course she was, but she really did look exactly like Laura Palmer, and Sarah needed her to be her so much. And so did Leland. In fact it was her telling them that she was leaving to return to Missoula that sealed her fate. They did not want her to leave. Leland/BOB would rather her dead.

I have personally experienced something similar to this on a number of occasions, the most recent being last Summer. I saw who I thought to be my best friend walking down the street one afternoon, too far away for me speak to her, but I was certain it was her. She didn’t see me. A few hours later I learned that she had been found dead that morning. This has happened to me several times, and is a fairly common phenomenon, a bit like that ‘thinking of someone and then they phone’ (or more likely text or WhatsApp these days). Had my friends vision been conjured up by her grieving mother? Had she come to say goodbye? This world we live in is a strange and mysterious place, I won’t write anything off.

Who else appeared sort of suddenly and perhaps mysteriously and then disappeared with very little commotion or rue? – that’s right, Annie Blackburn. I have always thought her arrival in Twin Peaks was odd, and since we learned about the manufacture of Dougie Jones, her story made more sense. Did Dale Cooper himself conjure up his perfect woman at a time when he needed someone to love the most? She was strange, cute, and full of wonder, just like him. He was under threat from Windom Earle, alone and couldn’t be with the eighteen year old Audrey Horne, so he made someone to take his mind off the temptation of her? Did he also instinctively know that love was the key to the Lodge? Annie was catatonic post abduction, we know not of her fate, other than that she was wearing the owl ring when she returned from the Lodge. Her sister Norma seemed rather nonplussed considering. Was she actually her sister at all? There was no mention of her in The Secret History of Twin Peaks, but she has not been ret-conned, there’s more to this story, and we will find out I am sure. Whilst she did exist, Hawk confirmed this earlier in Series 3, she was just perhaps someone’s dream made real.

So who was Dougie Jones conjured by? Does a Tulpa have the power to create a Tulpa of their own? Or was he manufactured by something good? The fact that he was reduced to a golden ball may be telling. That whoever created him, created him out of love. But who?

This leads us nicely onto the next part of the episode. Gordon walks into the room with Tammy and Albert and heralds, “It’s coffee time!”, Tammy with a smile gets up to make it. The feminist in me is always questioning why she makes the coffee every time, but she might just make a damn fine cup of coffee! Just then a the worlds worst window cleaner starts cleaning the window of the room, making the most awful screeching noise that messes with Gordons hearing aid in true comical fashion. Gordon tells them that Diane is on her way.

She enters, lights up her cigarette, sits downs and says, “Deputy Diane Reporting”. Gordon asks her about the last night she saw Cooper, did he by any chance mention Major Garland Briggs. Diane tells him she doesn’t want to talk about that night, but Gordon persuades her. Albert explains that a wedding ring was found in the stomach of Major Briggs and it was inscribed with the words, to Dougie, from Janey-E. Now for a massive and unexpected twist – Diane tells them that she has a sister, a half sister named Jane and she’s married to someone called Douglas Jones. That they live in Las Vegas last she knew but that they are estranged, they haven’t spoken in years.

What the hell?! Let’s think about this clearly. Diane has a sister who is married to a man that looks almost exactly like Agent Dale Cooper? Does Diane know this? It could be that she’s never seen him, if they have been estranged for some time, she might never have seen her sisters husband. If she has then is this why they are estranged? Does Diane know that her sister married a manufactured being? If Diane is working with Dopplecooper and it was he that manufactured Dougie then maybe she does know this. I still can’t quite believe that Diane is that mean though. Yes she’s a tough cookie on the outside, but I bet she’s got a gooey middle. I am still not convinced that Diane is working with Dopplecooper. If its not him, and its Jeffries that she is working with, then she’s leading them to exactly the right place.

In Part 12 we saw Diane receive a text message saying, ‘Las Vegas’. She replied, ‘they haven’t asked yet’. So she knew that the time was coming for them to tell her about the ring in Briggs’ stomach. Is Janey-E really her sister? There’s no real reason for her to lie about it, but at the same time it could just have been a way to get them to go to Las Vegas. Quite a tall tale though if not true. Surely Gordon and Albert would have known about Diane having a sister named Jane with a husband named Douglas Jones? They will have every bit of background information available to them, they knew what bar to find her drinking in, they’d know her family makeup. So was this a test to see what she would do next? Where she would lead them to?

After calling the FBI in Las Vegas and asking them to look out for Douglas Jones and Janey-E, that they are wanted in relation to a homicide, Gordon says, “Last night I had another Monica Belluci dream”, Tammy and Albert raise their eyebrows, assuming because of his penchant for beautiful European women, that this dream is going to be a little risqué.

“I was in Paris on a case, Monica called and asked me to meet her at a certain café, she said she needed to talk to me. When we met at the café, Cooper was there but I couldn’t see his face. Monica was very pleasant, she had brought friends, we all had a coffee. And then she said the ancient phrase, ‘We are like the dreamer, that dreams then lives inside a dream’. I told her I understood, and then she said, ‘but who is the dreamer?’ A very powerful uneasy feeling came over me, Monica looked past me and indicated to me to look back at something that was happening there, I turned and looked, I saw myself from long ago, in the old Philadelphia office listening to Cooper telling me he was worried about a dream he had, ‘Gordon its 10.10am on February 16th, I was worried about today because of the dream I told you about’ and that was the day Phillip Jeffries appeared and didn’t appear, ‘Cooper meet the long lost Phillip Jeffries! you may have heard of him from the Academy’ and while Jeffries was apparently there he raised his arm and pointed at Cooper, and asked me ‘who do you think that is there?’ Damn! I hadn’t remembered that! Now this is really something interesting to think about!”

Albert replies, “Yes I am beginning to remember that too“.

The dream inside a dream. But was it a dream? The Monica Belluci part was but it appears that what happened in Philadelphia with Jeffries really did happen as both Gordon and Albert are starting to remember. What made them forget I am not sure of, but I am glad its coming back to them now. This scene of course is what we have seen in Fire Walk With Me, it is infamous of course, as Jeffries goes on to tell them about the meeting at the Convenience Store, Judy and The Ring. Will they remember the rest of that moment?

Why couldn’t Gordon see Coopers face in the Paris dream? Purely because it is a symbolic reference that it is not the real Cooper? A tear drops down the face of Monica Belluci. Why is she sad, does she know what fate beholds them?

Who is the dreamer? I don’t think we will find that out until the end of the series, if ever. Jeffries the last we saw him was there to warn Gordon et al that they could not trust the Cooper they saw in front of them. That Cooper looked just like the Cooper we know and love, all the right clothing, hair and FBI pin, but maybe this is what the future Dopplecooper will look like if he’s clever enough. It appears then that Jeffries is one of the good guys, we have no idea if he still is, but considering he has been ‘missing’ but known to be alive all these years, in contact with Albert at one point, that he’s still working to find BOB and defeat him once and for all. Or has he, like Windom Earle was, lured into the darkness?

Next we find ourselves in Twin Peaks Sheriff station. Bobby has brought sandwiches for Frank, Andy, Hawk and himself. Frank brings in Chad, jovially but its a trap – the four police officer draw their weapons and arrest Chad. Frank tells him they’ve been watching him for months, and Andy takes him down to the cells.

Frank, Hawk, Andy and Bobby walk through the Ghostwood Forest, on their way to find Jack Rabbits Palace. A hum of electricity can be heard whistling in the trees. As they pass by a stream Bobby tells them that this is the way to Listening Post Alpha where his father worked. It was all top secret. He took him there when he was little but it was just lots and lots of machines. Bobby chuckles to himself when he sees it. A huge tree stump, high up like a mini mountain. This is it, Jack Rabbits Palace. Bobby tells them that they would sit there and make up tall tales. Hawk says they need to move 253 yards due East, and they all put some soil from the ground there in their pockets.

There’s some ethereal whooshing as they walk through the woods deeper, until they seem some smoke in a clearing a buzzing electricity. As they get closer they see the naked body of a woman, lying on the mossy ground, next to a stone pool, very much like the oily gateway we have seen before at Glastonberry Grove, but this pool is not filled with the dark substance, this is more like a thick pool of golden liquid. One sycamore tree stands beside the pool. The woman is alive, Andy holds her in his arms and turns her over, it is Naido. The woman who fell from the Purple space rooftop, who pulled the lever and was chucked we assumed then to her death. She appears to have lost her maroon dress in the process. Her eyes still sealed shut. It appears that she may have three eye holes, though that is not clear. The third eye of course being symbolic of intuition, I wonder whether her eyes will need to be opened for Cooper to find himself whole again.

It is now 2.53 fellas. A vortex starts to appear above the, much like the one found at The Zone, that almost sucked Gordon in. Andy lets go of Naido’s hand, the four lawmen look up into the sky, it gets dark. Then whoosh, Andy is sucked up into the grey place (White Lodge?) and sits opposite ?????? “I am the Fireman“, he says and raises his right hand. Andy is suddenly holding a strange contraption, a tesseract type shape but with a smoking proboscis. The smoke comes in reverse, into the object.

Andy looks up at a circular window above him. In the window appears a number of images. Firstly ‘the experiment’ as we saw it in the glass box in Part 1. Then ‘mother’ spewing the black orb of BOB. The Woodsman who asks, ‘Gotta Light?’, electricity cables, and the Woodsmen scurrying outside the convenience store. Then footage from the pilot of Twin Peaks, the school girl screaming and crying after learning of Laura Palmers death, red curtains shimmy then the face of Laura Palmer, this time with two angels either side, hers and Ronettes? Then a blurry image of Cooper that steadies to reveal the two Coopers faces. Next a telephone that looks like one from the Sheriffs station with a blinking button. Then Andy sees himself bringing Lucy down a hallway, and presenting her in front of a doorway. Then a vision of the telephone pole from the Fat Trout Trailer park with the number 6 on it, it flashes 3 times as if to state 666. The smoke travels into the object Andy is holding, and with that he is gone again. No words are spoken by Andy but you know he just knows what he has to do, he understands. Wow Andy! who would have thought this could happen to you. Was Andy one of the few people to have entered the White Lodge, and with perfect courage? What is the signficance of Lucy – is that moment she looks into the room a vision of the future? I can’t help feeling that she might be the one who will be able to recognise the real Cooper from his doppleganger when it comes down to the wire. As I said before, there are no flies on Lucy – she’s the queen of solving puzzles.

In a visual similar to that of the woodsmen outside the convenience store, Frank, Hawk, and Bobby all find themselves back at Jack Rabbits Palace. Shortly afterward Andy arrives too carrying Naido. He tells his comrades, “We have to get her down the mountain. She’s very important and people want her dead. She’s fine physically, we’ll need to put her in a cell where she will be safe“. Frank says ‘ok‘ and Andy tells them not to tell anyone about this. Frank and Hawk ask what happened back there, but neither of them can remember.

Back at the Sheriffs station Andy and Lucy take care of Naido. Lucy finds her a gown to wear. Chad is locked in one of the cells, and in another is a ‘drunk’ who is bleeding profusely from the mouth. He has black eyes, some of his teeth appear smashed out (I can’t help thinking of the teddy bear that talks to Johnny Horne, the teeth set in its mouth, probably not related at all, but this is almost as disturbing) and he has a dirty, bloodied piece of string tied around his face. The drunk repeats everything everyone says which drives Chad crazy. Naido makes a sound like a squawking bird or a monkey call . The drunk appears to copy her, but its almost as if they are communicating. Can this be the case?

The blood that is coming out of the drunks mouth is dripping in a pool on the floor but it doesn’t really look like blood, its yellowy, almost like oil. At this point we don’t know who the drunk is, if he’s important to the story or just a grotesque and freakish character making an already bizarre scene even more uncomfortable. But we do know that the last time anyone saw Billy (Audrey Horne’s mysterious lover), he was bleeding from the mouth and nose. Is this Billy? Does that mean that Billy is real, and not all in Audrey’s head as many suspect?

I am reminded in this scene of the barking that Bobby and Mike did at James way back in Series 1. Naido’s animal sounds are a little disturbing, she can’t see and she doesn’t know where she is and she’s stuck in a cell with a man either parodying or tormenting her and Chad of all people.

Who can Naido be? Her name in Japanese and in Buddhism means ‘Inner Path’ and in the now extinct Tambora language it means Black. Reversed it spells Odian which means ‘hated by’ in Spanish. Do any of these meanings mean anything? She appears to be from the White Lodge and she is important, but to whom and who wants her dead and why? She must hold the key to something special. She was of course able to switch the lever that sent Cooper through the electric portal and into the life of Dougie Jones. Without her where would he be now? If he had gone through the portal that she really did not want him to, would he be dead now?

Next stop we meet up with James Hurley, who it appears now is working as a security guard at the Great Northern Hotel. Its outside here that he’s sitting with colleague Freddie Sykes, who wears a mysterious green glove. We first saw Freddie In Part 1&2. At the time he was just the bloke with the green glove. It was odd, but this is David Lynch so no-one really wondered too much about it, thought it was just ‘one of those oddities’ and that it would probably never be mentioned again. Oh how we were wrong. Freddie sits crushing walnuts with said gloved hand. James asks if its true that Freddie really can’t take the glove off and Freddie tells him he tried, but its a part of him, he went to the doctor to take it off but he started bleeding. James reveals that its his birthday today (1st October we assume if the trip to Jack Rabbits Palace is anything to go by) and persuades Freddie to tell him the story of how he came to wear the glove.

The story is quite extraordinary and totally unexpected. He’s from Laandaan Taaaan (London Town) East End and his accent is so cock-er-ney I imagined him sprinting up a chimney any second. To anyone not UK based reading this, there is not a single Londoner that actually sounds like this, I found it hilarious! I can only imagine that Lynch asked him to do the most ridiculous accent he could do, which made perhaps the tallest tale of all in Twin Peaks even more absurd, but here goes:

Six months ago, after a night out Freddie gets a peculiar feeling as he’s walking into an alleyway. It strikes him that he’s wasting his life and that he should be helping people. He jumps up some boxes stacked high and then he gets sucked up into a vortex. He floats in thin air in a void then all of a sudden he’s in a room with ‘the Fireman’ who tells him he has to go to the hardware store and to buy one glove, one package will be open, buy that one and when he wears the glove it will give him the power of an enormous pile driver. Once he’s got the glove go to Twin Peaks, Washington. There he will find his destiny.

That’s pretty impressive. Firstly it appears he’s had the most coherent conversation with the Fireman anyone has ever had, either that or he just interpreted everything perfectly. Secondly he has a green rubber gardening glove fixed to his hand which gives him super strength! Super human strength has been a running theme in Twin Peaks over the years, Nadine of course found it but did not require a glove to harness it and as far as we know was not sent for by The Fireman to help out when the Apocalypse come. Freddie has been chosen for a reason, and he’s a nice simple lad, not unlike Andy, pure of heart, always wants to help others. So here he is awaiting his destiny with pure courage for whatever is about to happen next. What will his super strength be required for? In an arm wrestle against Dopplecooper? to break something unbreakable? to pile drive someone into non-existence? Who knows, but my god I am so looking forward to finding out. It is without a doubt going to be absurd and surreal and magnificent. Freddie Sykes, my hero.

James after hearing this spectacular story goes into the furnace area of the Great Northern and hears the hum that Ben and Beverley have been hearing in the building. There’s something behind a door. What can it possibly be? After the green glove story I don’t think I am even going to try and predict what might happen next. But you know I just have a feeling this lovely ethereal tune, like a Tibetan singing bowl, could be something glorious, and who better to find her than old flame James? And on his birthday, what a present that would be.

Lastly but definitely not least we see Sarah Palmer visiting Elks Point #9 Bar. She pulls up a stool at the bar and orders a Bloody Mary. A male patron wearing a t-shirt with the motif, ‘Truck You’ sidles up to her. Sarah is polite, but makes it obvious she is not interested and this guy, like so many men do, gets nasty, calls her a bull dyke, says it’s a free Country and he can do what he likes, FREE CUNT-RY. Now I don’t think there is a woman reading this who hasn’t experienced something similar in her lifetime at a bar with some sleazy guy. Most men aren’t like this of course but there’s always one, and that one you’ll never forget. So when Sarah Palmer then turned to face him, and said, “You sure you wanna fuck with this?” whilst removing her face to firstly reveal a black void, a razor tongue, then a white hand, the ring finger blackened. The hands disappears to be replaced by a huge grinning set of teeth, which don’t look unlike Laura Palmers. She puts her face back on then lunges at the man, ripping his throat out. He falls to floor gushing with blood and is dead.

Woah. That was pretty hardcore. So what has got a hold of Sarah? As I said earlier there is perhaps no-one that has suffered quite as much as Sarah. 25 years of pain and sorrow have created a monster more powerful than anything we have seen before. Is this where ‘mother’ has been hiding out since her release from the glass box? Now we know that Laura was ripped from the Lodge just before Cooper was dropped into non-existence could Laura be the experiment? What we see of Laura in the lodge may not be the Laura we know and love. She’s never answered yes when Cooper asks if she’s Laura Palmer. Sometimes her arm bend back. She’s her cousin. She’s dead yet she lives. This horrific manifestation of abuse and pain and the hands of BOB, her father and countless other men and women during her short life may have created something really nasty, and its about to get its revenge.

But the real Laura is The One, and the pure golden version of her is out there too, and she is going to be needed for the final battle. How she will play her part, and what effect her rebirth into our world will have is perhaps beyond the realms of our imagination. the truth is out there. But don’t look. Patience is its own reward.

One Reply to “Who Killed Ruth Davenport? Part 14, We are like the dreamer”

I once read Tulsa that are created need morals and values and a bio created with them.
If they don’t have these, they act however they want.
I can’t recall the rest of that and may be inaccurate. I think there was experiment by Buddhist Monks (?) years ago.
The Tulpa started showing up and all witnesses were able to describe the Tulpa with the same details.
Personally, I sometimes wonder if this happens at Well known haunted places. Despite the fact certain ghosts have not been proven to ever exist. They are seen as ghosts.
I don’t know- great blog. Really like it😊👍🏻